Lucy removed her glasses and watched Ellie's thin, thirteen-year-old fingers splay against the girl's too-flat stomach.

"Try it," Lucy said.

"I don't have much breath."

"I know." The confession drilled so much deeper than it would have coming from any of Lucy's other students. "Please try."

She watched as Ellie struggled to fill her scarred lungs from the bottom without moving her upper chest or shoulders. The girl's hand moved an inch.

"Now, inhale and exhale without letting your hand move at all."

"I can't."

Lucy tilted her head, eyebrows raised, wordlessly urging a response from Ellie.

Ellie smiled. "Time to be brave? Braver than I feel?"

"Right." Lucy traced the girl's line of sight to one of the dozens of motivational posters on the wall. Be Brave. Braver than you feel. Next to it, Right or wrong, blow it strong. Beside that one, Practice doesn't make perfect. It makes possible. Lucy's favorite, Just so you know, dogs don't eat music homework.

"Deep breath from the bottom of your lungs. Push your abdomen out to allow air in. Hold it. Now two small breaths in and out without moving your hand. There! You did it!"

Ellie pressed her lips together but couldn't stop the smile that overrode her efforts. "I didn't think I could."

"Now, let's try that technique for these four measures." Lucy pointed to the sheet on the music stand. "Keep that expansion in your tummy, even though you'll have to breathe. See if it doesn't help you maintain that beautiful tone you've been working on."

The girl raised the silver flute to her pursed lips, a mix of eagerness and skepticism on her face. She exaggerated the movement of her abdomen, her striped shirt proving her obedience, and played the specified measures. Ellie's eyes flashed her reaction before she lowered her flute. "That," she said, "was awesome!"

Tears tickled Lucy's sinuses. "Yes, it was."

"Does that work with singing, too? Could I join choir next year? Is there room for me?"

Laughter poured out of Lucy's mouth, but it originated in her heart. "Four brilliant measures and you're ready to tackle singing, too?" As quickly as the laughter erupted, it died. Her choir? Next year?

"My doctor says he owes you." Ellie's flute lay in her lap, the thin fingers cradling it. She stifled most of a cough. "He says he never would have thought of music as cystic fibrosis therapy."

I never thought my first chair flutist would muscle through CF to keep playing. "I'm glad it's helping."

"GDBD," she said, running her fingers over the instrument.

"Good days, bad days?"

Ellie looked up. "Do you text?" Incredulity.

Lucy took no offense. Even at a few months shy of fifty-six, she must have seemed ancient to a thirteen-year-old. Despite her sassy haircut. And artsy earrings, thanks to Ania's jewelry-making skills. "Is today a good day, Ellie?"

The girl lifted her flute then pointed to the line of notes on the page, as a pool player might point to the pocket where she intended the eight ball to land. "Mrs. Tuttle, any day I'm breathing is considered a good day." She inhaled without moving her shoulders and played the measures as if running a victory lap. Which she would likely never do. Run.

Lucy was three hours away from another school board budget-cut meeting. Could she keep breathing? The discussion had crept too close to destroying scenes like this one with Ellie. Only Lucy's dogged sense of propriety had kept her from storming the school board's line of tables and chairs last time. If it crept much closer ...

Lucy turned her attention back to her admiration for a thirteen-year-old's breathless ability to muscle through.

* * *

When Ellie's smile left the room, Lucy retreated to her cramped office at the end of the line of three small practice rooms. She stared at the screen of her laptop, open to her calendar. The school day was over, but her list of duties hadn't shrunk. Spring concert next week. She needed to sneak in another announcement for the Woodbridge radio station and create another mass text message for the parents and grandparents who paid more attention to texts than they did the school's weekly newsletter.

Charlie said he'd eat at Bernie's tonight. She could work straight through until the budget-cut meeting if she wanted. He'd meet her there. Why couldn't he be the one to speak up in a public forum? Why did he slip into it'll-all-work-out mode when her life stood in the crosshairs? So much for knight on a white horse. But he would be there. She didn't have to wonder if he'd show up.

She needed a new office chair. One that didn't groan when she moved. Or was that sound coming from her soul?

Two hours later she pushed away from her desk and closed the lid of her laptop. She shouldn't head into the meeting with an empty stomach. But it might be emptied by the outcome of the gathering, barring divine intervention. So she had no clear choice.

Divine intervention. Nothing short would move a woman like Evelyn Schindler, who approached budget cuts with the ruthlessness of a self-guided chain saw.

* * *

"It's difficult to take your perspective seriously," Evelyn "Chain Saw" Schindler said, leaning too far into her microphone. She jerked back, as if she'd chipped a tooth in her enthusiasm to make her point. Straightening her posture to a stiffness well past at ease, she added, "You're the music instructor, Mrs. Tuttle. Is there any doubt where you'd stand on the issue? Those overly passionate add a skewed perspective to the subject at hand. I think we can all agree on that."

The woman nodded to the board members on her left and right, some of whom nodded back. Others dropped their gaze. And their opportunity to disagree. Lucy's friends, some of them. People she'd known since her father held the position she clung to now with a free-climber's fingertips-only grip.

Nothing but air at her back. Hundreds of feet above the sun-baked canyon floor. Toes pretending the quarter-inch crack in the rock is enough. Fingertips stretching skyward, muscles straining to hold out for a dependable ledge.

"Mrs. Tuttle." The board president's voice sounded like one reserved for the detention room.

"What?"

"You can lower your hand. We've heard your opinion. There are others waiting to have their say."

Lower her —? That's what she needed. Another reason to be embarrassed. She slipped her hand down and bent to retrieve her bottled water from the floor. It bought her enough time to refocus.

Charlie patted her knee. Could have been his "Steady, girl," or "There, there now," or "Way to go, honey." Probably one of the first two options.

The next speaker's rabbit trail wandered so far afield, Lucy feared his point had already crossed into the next county without him. Hope followed — a string of community members, many of them parents of her students — voicing logical, well-expressed reasons to look someplace other than art and music for the necessary cuts.

For a small town like Willowcrest to maintain a private school without federal funding for more than four decades, they'd danced to the edge of tough decisions more than once. The seriously sports-minded usually transferred to a Woodbridge school. But thanks in large part to Lucy's father's influence, the music program kept students in Willowcrest.

That point worked its way into the next speaker's impassioned...